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First Reformed presents looks at current social issues through the lens of religion and specifically the eyes of a pastor from a failing Reformed church. To its credit, it attempts to give a well-rounded view of these issues. Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), is recently divorced and has lost his son in the Iraq war. Coming from a long line of male graduates of Virginia Military Institute, Toller had been an armed-services chaplain; he had encouraged his son to enlist…

In late October, a gunman opened fire on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in United States history. Earlier the same week, a white supremacist killed two black customers at a grocery store in Louisville. All of this came on the heels of an attempted mass bombing in which pipe bombs were sent to high-ranking progressive politicians, including two former presidents. Are Christians even paying attention to these levels of hate, to the…

Benedict Joseph Labre was an unemployed transient who begged around Europe for 13 years, eating refuse that other people didn’t want and clothing himself in rags. He was infested with vermin; he smelled bad. Yet fewer than a hundred years after his death in 1783, the Roman Catholic Church canonized him a saint. How and why did this happen? More important, what does it tell us about homelessness today? “The poor you will always have with you,” Christ said in…

The practice of baptizing infants has been sufficiently defended by many writers. (Bromiley’s Children of Promise: The Case for Baptizing Infants and Brownson’s The Promise of Baptism are both good examples.) So too, the supposed necessity of immersion has been well contested. What’s often overlooked is that our disagreements on infant baptism harbors a deeper division on the foundational meaning of baptism to begin with. I want to address this contentious issue in a new way, by rethinking the baptism…

The universe is vast. On the average, it is about 140 million miles to Mars, which is our next-door neighbor. Considering the broader solar system (from Neptune to the sun), if we were to throw a dart at the solar system, the odds of hitting anything would only be about one in 10 million. Further out, the next closest star in our galaxy is four light years, or tens of trillions of miles, away. Andromeda, the next closest galaxy, is…

“Did you know that the phrase ‘daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer really means ‘supersubstantial bread’? Like, supernatural?” This is the sort of tidbit that gets dropped casually at my house from time to time. It’s what happens when you live with a seminary professor. “Where did that come from?” I asked my spouse. “I dunno. The interwebs.” Classic. Turns out it’s true. How many times have I prayed the Lord’s Prayer – thousands? And I never heard this before?…

On a leafy Sunday morning, the girls, adorned in lacy white dresses, and the boys, decked out in immaculate suits and ties, excitedly joined their families in a colorful parade to Our Lady of Grace on Avenue W in Brooklyn, New York. Our son’s second-grade friends and their parents had spent weeks preparing for the big day – First Communion. After the church service, joyous celebrations resounded amidst backyard grape vines, fig trees and colorful lanterns. The term “first communion”…